Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything

Erik Isberg, a high school student, tweeted from a National Day celebration on Wednesday in his hometown, Trollhattan.Credit
Casper Hedberg for The New York Times

TROLLHATTAN, Sweden — Chances of embarrassment are unusually high when you are @Sweden, the nation’s official Twitter spokesperson.

“In one of my first tweets, I managed to spell ‘finish’ wrong — with two n’s, like ‘Finnish,’ ” said Erik Isberg, an 18-year-old high school student who was @Sweden for the week ending Sunday. “I thought, ‘How can I manage this for a week if I misspell a word like that?’ And then I thought, ‘It’s supposed to represent typical Swedes — and a lot of Swedes don’t speak perfect English.’ ”

If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment, a government initiative that entrusts the country’s Twitter account to a new citizen every seven days, it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede.

One @Sweden posted photographs of his Christmas moose hunt. Another tartly criticized the foreign secretary, Carl Bildt. Another declared that she would like to be making love, so to speak, right that very second. Another, a Muslim lawyer, discussed the ubiquity of the name Muhammad among immigrants and joked that if anyone forgot the names of her six brothers, Muhammad would do fine.

And Jack Werner, the very first @Sweden, attracted thousands of followers and the nickname “the masturbating Swede” after he decided to be honest when listing his favorite leisure activities. (He also enjoys “drinking a lot of coffee” and “hanging out with my friends.”)

“I wanted to show that I’m often kind of immature and often kind of stupid and so is this country, and I bet you are, too, and so are a lot of people around the world,” Mr. Werner, 23, said in a telephone interview. “It’s much more interesting than saying things like, ‘Look at these fabulous pictures of nature.’ ”

The oldest @Sweden so far was 60. The youngest was Mr. Isberg, who lives with his parents and younger brother in this town in southwest Sweden, former home to the sadly shuttered Saab car company. The day he was interviewed was Sweden’s National Day, a public holiday. He had gotten up late, and so had the @Sweden account.

“So far I’ve celebrated the national day in what I think is the most common way: sleeping the morning away,” he tweeted.

Photo

Sweden wants to showcase the nation's diverse voices.Credit
The New York Times

At home, he was being treated as a teenager first, @Sweden second.

“Have you had anything to eat yet?” asked his mother, Monica, somewhat sharply (it was nearly lunchtime). Mr. Isberg accepted a piece of bread and took out his cellphone. A photographer snapped his picture.

“Twittering while a photographer runs around trying to take a photo of how I look when I’m Twittering,” Mr. Isberg posted.

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire.

“Sweden stands for certain values — being progressive, democratic, creative,” Patrick Kampmann, Volontaire’s creative director, said in an interview. “We believed the best way to prove it was to handle the account in a progressive way and give control of it to ordinary Swedes.”

The @Swedens are nominated by others — people are not supposed to put their own name forward — and then selected by a committee of three, including Mr. Kampmann. The qualifications are that they have to be interesting, Twitter-literate and happy to post in English.

They are told not to do anything criminal, to label political opinions as their own and “not to make it sound like the entire Sweden feels that way,” said Cherin Awad, the Muslim lawyer, who was @Sweden from Feb. 27 to March 4.

“I tell them, ‘Please, do this with some dignity — remember that this is an official channel and there are a lot of people reading this, so don’t make a fool of yourself,’ ” he said. “It’s only a soft suggestion.”

The program has inspired similar projects in other places, including Ireland, New Zealand and the city of Leeds in England, though most have been organized privately and without government imprimatur.

Photo

Erik Isberg, 18, was @Sweden for a week, posting from the country's Twitter account.Credit
Casper Hedberg for The New York Times

If Mr. Isberg was surprised to learn he was being considered for the @Sweden post, he was not as surprised as his mother, an engineering professor. Among other things, she was not altogether sure what Twitter was.

“I said, ‘Eric, cool down, just relax,’ ” Mrs. Isberg recalled of the moment that her son announced he might be speaking for nine million people on a Web site she had never seen. “Don’t make any big plans, because it won’t happen.”

But it did happen (“They were very brave to trust him,” his mother said). And although he has hardly become so famous that fans are mobbing him in the streets of Trollhattan, which he described in one post as “not exactly Times Square,” Mr. Isberg has found unexpected benefits to the job.

The authorities at his school waived their usual rule against in-class tweeting (one teacher told Mr. Isberg he could skip all his classes, if he needed more time to post). When he posted enticing photographs of the school lunch buffet one day, he got so many envious responses from places like Saudi Arabia and Britain that he passed them along to the cook.

School cooks rarely get compliments from anyone, let alone from students around the world. “He was overwhelmed,” Mr. Isberg said.

As the voice of the nation, Mr. Isberg said, he felt obligated to answer questions put to him by the nation’s followers (@Sweden has more than 28,000). Many asked him about National Day, a day of patriotic celebration instituted in 2005.

He did not know all the details — “I was like, 11” — so he consulted Google. “No one knows why we celebrate it,” he posted. “Usually we just eat something nice for dinner.”

Nor could he answer the question put by a follower who wanted to know where in Stockholm to see the transit of Venus. “I had to explain that it’s like 400 km to Stockholm and I had no idea, though I sent them a link to the astrological society,” he said.

But another question, about what he wanted to do with his life, left him stumped. “I’m not supposed to be some commercial product — I’m just supposed to be myself,” Mr. Isberg said. “And that says more about Sweden than anything else.”

Correction: June 11, 2012

An earlier version of the picture captions with this article misspelled Erik Isberg’s given name as Eric.

A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe